I’ve had my own domain for… jeez, it must be at least 15 years at this point. Honestly, it’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I got my last name .org, and I use it for my professional website and for just about everything personal. Whenever I sign up with a new company, I give them an email like newcompany@mylastname.org, so I can tell if they’ve sold the contact to some other company, and it makes my logins a lot more secure. Plus, it makes it very easy to organize my email. I highly recommend this.
Anyway… this morning, I got an email from a domain broker who is representing someone who wants to buy my domain. I’ve got no intention of selling- I find having the domain is just too useful. But it got me to thinking…
Assuming I got a huge offer, what would even be the process of extricating myself from that domain? Every company I deal with has their own email and login for me, so trying to track down everything would be a huge hassle. Even services I haven’t used in years and have completely forgotten about would have some variation of email@mylastname.org. Obviously my website would have to change, but I think that’d be the easy part. Everything else… it seems like it’d be years before I could track down all of the places I’ve used it… and I don’t see that working if I sell it to someone before I start the extrication process.
Also, it occurred to me that passing this domain down to my wife and then son would probably be a good idea- does anyone ever bequeath a domain to an heir?
It seems like the email problem is basically the same whether it’s a normal address like soandso@gmail.com or your custom domain address. In both cases, you’d need to figure out everyone who has the old email and change them to a new one. But you don’t necessarily have to fix all the old addresses. Some of the old stuff it may not matter. If you have to create a new logon on kittingworld.com or whatever, no big deal. But for anything to do with important stuff like financial matters, you’d want to get the email updated.
Where does your email end up? Does it stay on your mylastname.org server or does it get forwarded to something like gmail? To find out the set of email addresses you’ve created, you could extract them from the text in the email database.
As for bequeathing the domain, that should be possible. The executor would need to update the billing information to the heir. The executor should be able to act on your behalf to contact the domain hosting company directly. Or if you want to make it easy on the executor, leave instructions on how to access the account in your will.
Some jurisdictions have laws specifically relating to the transfer of electronic assets to heirs, as well as ensuring the executor/administrator can have electronic access to the deceased’s bank accounts, brokerage accounts, insurance, etc.
The law in Saskatchewan is the Fiduciaries Access to Digital Information Act, SS 2020, c 6, which I think was the first such law in Canada. I don’t know if other provinces or territories have similar legislation. I would think at least some of the US states, like California, would have similar legislation.
Lawyers who deal with wills and estates are likely asking about electronic assets as part of the drafting process for wills, I would expect.
Presumably the buyer is going to actually use the domain rather than just buy it and leave it in the OP’s control. So no, the buyer is not going to allow his newly purchased domain to be redirected.